Outside of coaching people along their fitness and health journey, I also run a few websites. The one we’re featuring today — ifastuniversity.com — is the most intricate.

What purpose does the site serve?

This site acts as our membership, premium content subscription product. Our Premium Members get access to all the content on the site (mostly video), have access to a private Facebook group for discussion, and are allowed the ability to comment on posts in the website.

Who is our product for?

We have a tight niche in the fitness industry around deep continued education for coaches. It is not well-suited for people who are just getting into personal training.

Software We Use

The site is run on WordPress. This was the content management system (CMS) with which I was most familiar. There are many plugins that have helped my limited coding knowledge really speed things up.

There’s a membership plugin called MemberMouse(affiliate link) that protects pages from the people not paying and manages all the member billing and account usage. This allows me to customize each page based on someone’s access rights:

Members see a video

Visitors see a sales pitch

We upload our paid videos to Vimeo(affiliate link) and “hide them from Vimeo.com”. They get embedded on each page on our site. This is for hosting our videos and let’s us only allow them on certain domains, i.e. ifastuniversity.com.

We have free videos on a YouTube page. We will also upload those to our website. This is for marketing purposes, mostly, because we needed some ways for people to try us out.

Web Hosting

To run a website, there needs to be a computer somewhere to serve the website to people when they type in your URL (e.g. ifastuniversity.com). This is called this web hosting. Our site is hosted by DreamHost, using their middle-of-the-road DreamPress hosting(affiliate link).

Full disclosure, though, I now use Flywheel(affiliate link) for hosting my other websites. Their app just makes everything really easy.

Social Media

We do not use Instagram, Snapchat, etc. for our company and don’t do much with our Facebook page, which is different than the Facebook group mentioned before. It’s just too much work for too little reward on our too little time.

Biggest Challenges

The hardest stuff is always business-related, not software related. DreamHost and MemberMouse have been really helpful in offering support when I need help (that’s one of the things you pay for). I don’t regret using either company.

The other main issue is just with juggling the software. WordPress has standards for plugin developers to follow, but not every piece of software will run together. Picture even a big tech company, and I can tell you that every time they introduce something new, no matter how small, it breaks something else. Software engineers are on call just like medical professionals.

I already have a website and someone to run it, but I want you to run it now

I already have a website and someone to run it, but I need someone to write the sales text

I already have a website and someone to run it, but I need photos I can use

What's the URL of your website?

Describe the vision you have for your website: *

What is the single most important goal of the site? Do you want this to supplement a physical location? Or is this more of an online-only project? Do you have a compelling offer for new customers? Do you have testimonials to show people? Do you have pictures you can use without violating copyright? Do you have someone to write compelling sales text? I can help you work through these questions if we do end up working together.